The concept of time is a very important concept utilized throughout everyday life. For example, most people earn a living according to the time they spend at a certain occupational endeavor or vocation. Furthermore, business meetings, school classes, sporting events and innumerable other daily life activities are focussed around time.
However, the importance of time is not reserved only for adults, but also must be impressed upon school age children, and particularly very young school age children. Furthermore, mentally/challenged individuals, whether adult or child, must be as familiar as possible with the concept of time, in order to be acclimated into as normal a lifestyle as possible. Therefore, it is very important for people to learn how to tell time and preferably to learn at an early age. Since clocks with traditional faces are still the predominant time pieces is use today, telling time from a clock face is particularly important. To that end, tools for teaching the concept of time are useful.
Young children and others not familiar with traditional clocks are usually exposed to a number of different timing implements, such as small hour glasses filled with sand utilized to play games, as well as timers, such as food timers or timers on microwaves and ovens, which ring or buzz when time has expired. However, neither of these devices are very helpful in providing a correlation to elapsed time or remaining time on a clock face. Rather, they utilize a single incidence, i.e., the sand running out or the ringing/buzzing noise to indicate that the time for particular task has expired. Furthermore, many of the available clocks and watches used today are digital and provide no guidance to a person learning to tell time, other than giving the exact numerical time. Digital time devices are not correlated to a clock face and thus are not very good teaching tools.
The other available option for teaching time is simply to utilize a normal clock with an hour hand and a minute hand. However, the time concept as presented by a traditional clock face is somewhat abstract and hard to understand from the, simple perspective of a child or a mentally challenged individual because the hands seem to progress around the clock face with no indication of a start position or a stop position. For that reason, many children and mentally challenged individuals are frustrated with determining the exact time, the remaining time, or the elapsed time from a traditional clock. While the ultimate goal is to be able to tell time from a traditional clock face, a more simple and concrete example of time is needed for teaching and for the eventual progression to the clock face with the minute and hour hands.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for an apparatus and method which will more readily and more easily teach young children and mentally challenged individuals the concept of time. To that end, it is an objective of the present invention to facilitate teaching of the concept of time.
It is a further objective of the present invention to teach the concept of remaining time for a particular task and also elapsed time from the moment the task was begun.
It is still another objective of the present invention to reduce the abstract concept of clock time to something more concrete and teach a child or person the "feel" of remaining and elapsed time. To that end, it is desirable to provide a visual indication of time.
It is another objective of the invention to give a person the experience that remaining time has expired and that time for a particular task has completely expired without having the person know how to tell the exact time on a clock face.
It is still another objective of the present invention to teach the concept of remaining time and elapsed within the confines of a traditional clock face so that the transition from remaining or elapsed time to telling exact time from a traditional clock face is more comfortable and natural.